Currently in the transport of materials, if that transport is land based, the amount of material that can be transported in any single load is limited to the land based infrastructure such as roads, bridges, underpasses and the like. Land based transport of any distance is typically either by truck or rail. By truck, the size of the load is limited by roadway restrictions. By railway, the size of loads is limited by the railway bed and railway infrastructure restrictions such as tunnels and bridges, i.e. width, height and weight of load and, at some point, length of load also impacts rail shipments. On rail, load length is not as important as it is for truck haulage. Water transport does not have the same degree of size limitations as does truck and rail transport, but water transport is limited by other factors that truck and rail transport are not.
Oceangoing water transport has historically been limited by the water depths available to dock oceangoing vessels. As such, oceangoing transport is typically limited to those geographical locations with suitable deep water port facilities. As for inland water transport of materials, river water depths have limited the size of vessels. The relatively shallow depth of inland waters has necessitated using conventional river barges to move material over inland waters to oceangoing ports. At these oceangoing ports, the material is then unloaded from the barges and either loaded directly onto oceangoing ships or the material is put in storage for later loading onto oceangoing ships. The limitations, as to where oceangoing vessels can dock and the corresponding depth of inland waters, makes the waterborne shipment of materials a logistically challenging process.
Geographical areas that do not have suitable port facilities have to ship their goods which are to be transported by oceangoing vessels to areas with suitable port facilities for transshipment to distant areas, and at these distant destinations unloading of material is limited to those areas with suitable port facilities where goods can be unloaded for shipment to their final land/inland destination. These limitations have necessarily and accordingly restricted the intercontinental movement of large amounts of materials to only those geographical areas with natural occurring port facilities.
Another disadvantage with water transport of bulk materials, such as grain, is that it is impossible to keep high quality product segregated from lower quality product. For example, grain for foreign sale or oceangoing shipment is often transported by river barge to an ocean port where the grain is unloaded into grain storage elevators. From the grain storage elevators, the grain is transferred to an oceangoing ship for transport to a foreign country. However, since all of the grain is transferred into grain storage elevators at the shipping port, any poor quality grain that has been transported to the port is mixed with the other grain. Mixing this poor quality grain with the higher quality grain lowers the value of the higher quality grain and prevents producers of higher quality grain from obtaining a premium on the sale of their grain.